Rogozhin's Murder of Nastasya

Rogojin's murder of Nastasya Philipovna is the catastrophic climax of Dostoevsky's novel, an act of jealous, possessive love that destroys both victim and killer and leaves Prince Myshkin permanently shattered. The killing, carried out with a garden knife in Rogojin's dark house on the night Nastasya fled her own wedding, transforms the three central characters into a tableau of madness, death, and idiocy from which none recovers.

The Weapon and the Act

The murder weapon was a garden knife with a bone handle and a blade about eight inches long, broad in proportion, that did not clasp. Rogojin had kept it inside a copy of Solovieff's Russian History on his table. Earlier that same day, when Prince Myshkin visited Rogojin's house, he had twice absently picked up the knife, and each time Rogojin snatched it from his hand and threw it onto another table. The prince asked whether Rogojin cut his pages with it; Rogojin answered "Yes" and then, when the prince observed it was quite new, shouted furiously, "Can't I buy a new knife if I like?" The prince later recalled this exchange with horror. The knife entered only a couple of inches under Nastasya's left breast, and there was not more than half a tablespoonful of blood altogether—an internal hemorrhage, as the prince recognized, when the blow goes straight to the heart.

The Night of the Killing

After Nastasya fled from her own wedding ceremony at Pavlofsk, Rogojin took her by carriage to the station and then by train to St. Petersburg. She was mad with terror in the train and begged him to bring her to his house, refusing to go to her own rooms at the Ismailofsky barracks for fear the prince would find her there. They crept in very carefully, just as Rogojin and the prince would do the following night. Nastasya whispered and walked on tip-toe, carrying her skirt over her arm so it would not rustle, and held up her finger at Rogojin on the stairs to make him keep quiet—it was the prince she was afraid of. When she went to bed, she was still talking about going to Orel the next day. Rogojin took the knife out of the locked drawer at about three in the morning, and the killing happened in the early hours.

The Discovery of the Body

The following night, Rogojin led Prince Myshkin into the house through the dark, having told the porter and his mother's servants that he was off to Pavlofsk. He unlocked the door, let the prince in, locked it behind them, and put the key in his pocket. In the study, a heavy green silk curtain divided the room, hiding the alcove where Rogojin's bed stood. Rogojin lifted the curtain and motioned the prince to go in. It was very dark, but the prince could just make out a bed. Someone was asleep upon it in an absolutely motionless sleep—not the slightest movement, not the faintest breathing. The sleeper was covered with a white sheet; the outline of the limbs was hardly distinguishable. All around, on the bed, on a chair beside it, on the floor, were scattered the different portions of a magnificent white silk dress, bits of lace, ribbons, and flowers. On a small table at the bedside glittered a mass of diamonds, torn off and thrown down anyhow. From under a heap of lace at the end of the bed peeped a small white foot, which looked as though it had been chiseled out of marble; it was terribly still. A fly awoke, buzzed across the room, and settled on the pillow.

The Vigil

Rogojin had covered the body with American oilcloth, put a sheet over that, and placed four jars of disinfectant around, on account of the smell—just as they did at Moscow, he said. He had thought of buying flowers and putting them all round her, but was afraid it would make them sad to see her with flowers. He dragged cushions off all the sofas and laid them on the floor up against the curtain, for himself and the prince to lie on together. "For if they come in and look about now, you know, they'll find her, and carry her away, and they'll be asking me questions, and I shall say I did it, and then they'll take me away, too, don't you see? So let her lie close to us—close to you and me." The prince agreed: "Not for anything!" They locked the door and lay down. Rogojin began to wander, muttering disconnectedly, then took to shouting and laughing. The prince stretched out a trembling hand and gently stroked his hair and his cheeks—he could do nothing more. His legs trembled again and he seemed to have lost the use of them. A new sensation came over him, filling his heart and soul with infinite anguish. When the daylight grew full and strong, the prince lay down as though overcome by despair and laid his face against the white, motionless face of Rogojin. His tears flowed on to Rogojin's cheek, though he was perhaps not aware of them himself.

Aftermath

When, after many hours, the door was opened and people thronged in—Lebedeff, the two ladies, Rogojin's brother, and the police, brought by the widow's alarm and the porter's evidence—they found the murderer unconscious and in a raging fever. The prince was sitting by him, motionless, and each time that the sick man gave a laugh or a shout, he hastened to pass his own trembling hand over his companion's hair and cheeks, as though trying to soothe and quiet him. But he understood nothing of what was said to him and recognized none of those who surrounded him. Rogojin suffered from brain fever for two months. When he recovered, he was tried, gave full and direct evidence, was convicted with extenuating circumstances, and condemned to hard labor in Siberia for fifteen years. He heard his sentence grimly, silently, and thoughtfully. The prince was taken back to Switzerland, to Dr. Schneider's establishment, where the doctor frowns ever more and shakes his head, hinting that the brain is fatally injured and allowing himself to express the gravest fears. If Schneider himself had seen his former patient then, he would have flung up his hands despairingly and cried, as he did then: "An idiot!"